Light and Dark

Posted Jul 5, 2010 - 4:08 AM:
Subject: Light and Dark
Why is it that one cannot be without the other?For to have no white,is to have no black.To have good is to have evil.Sugar o'er himself the devil with our good deeds;The brightest flame casts the darkest shadow,and still I sit here with the need to know;To have something is to have what it's not,for something gives nothing meaning.The inverse is true,so I ask you;Would you extinguish light to extinguish dark?

I like the way you phrased your post because it's actually open to more interpretation than usual posts. I agree with you for one, but I suspect my reading of your post is not the one that most other people taking it to be (or one you even intended!). I'm perfectly happy to say that meaning is self-referential for one - that words and concepts do not refer to objects, but to other words and meanings, that meanings are defined only in relations to other meanings - that light is given meaning in opposition to dark(ness) and all the other shades of grey in between and so on, or that that good is given depth by evil and all the shades of morality in between and so on, or that unicorns are defined in relation to horses that do not have a horn on their head or other concepts in general...

The catch is that precisely because meaning is self-referential, it is not exactly premised on the actual existence of 'things' as such, that we don't actaully need the state of darkness to know what darkness is, or we don't actually need to see an actually-existing-unicorn to know what a unicorn is. (To be more precise, the actaully existing 'thing' is what disrupts every given meaning, but I won't get into that...). Moral is, I like this post

zenjael wrote:Why is it that one cannot be without the other?For to have no white,is to have no black.To have good is to have evil.Sugar o'er himself the devil with our good deeds;The brightest flame casts the darkest shadow,and still I sit here with the need to know;To have something is to have what it's not,for something gives nothing meaning.The inverse is true,so I ask you;Would you extinguish light to extinguish dark?

Welcome to the forums.

Your post reads to me like romantic poetry, not philosophy, and certainly not ethics.

I believe that the OP is based on human perception. Does not the darkness need to be pierced by light in order to see what the darkness hides within it? Our eyes would do us no good if there was no light to see by. Perhaps the unicorn does not exist because there was not enough light to see the horn, or there would need to be more light than the human eye can process in order to identify it. It takes enough light to make white appear at it's fullest. How much more light would it take to make black appear white? We can see that white appears black in total darkness. It fascinates me to the fact that we have to use a certain amount of energy in order to pierce darkness. Why is it that we do not perceive light with darkness? The universe itself is darkness with balls of energy that emanate light.